Modern cemeteries are sprawling and quiet, glimpsed from car windows or over fences, but mostly cut off from the world of the living. The dead used to be near us. Cemeteries were small and located in the center of towns and cities, visible reminders of mortality. The evolution of the cemetery reflects changing attitudes towards death, as well as the population growth of people and, subsequently, corpses.

The guide below traces modern cemetery history through Atlas Obscura locations.

Churchyard Cemetery The Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow :: Tarrytown, New York With the rise of Christianity in Europe and then the United States, most people were buried in churchyard cemeteries. Churches like the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow had small plots of land where the richest parishioners were buried in the eastern part (to see the sunrise on Judgement Day), while the unbaptized and other less holy people were buried in the northern corner.

Town CemeteryNew York Marble Cemetery :: New York, New YorkA few private town cemeteries were also available, such as the New York Marble Cemetery. A “place of interment for gentlemen,” it was designed with all below ground marble tombs to prevent the spread of disease. This was increasingly becoming a problem with the church cemeteries, which were overflowing with coffin stacked upon coffin, bodies decomposing while barely covered with soil.

CatacombsLes Catacombes de Paris :: Paris, France Filled to capacity, the church cemeteries became putrid dumping grounds, where walls sometimes broke open and spilled rotting bodies onto the sidewalk or into the basements of neighboring buildings. Needing a solution to this public health hazard, some cities opted to relocate cemeteries. The quarry tunnels in Paris were used to hold entire cemeteries of exhumed skeletons. The bones were carefully stacked and accompanied by a sign stating their original resting place.

Garden Cemetery Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno :: Genova, Italy For the burial of those Parisians who had not yet turned to skeletons, Père Lachaise was established on the outskirts of the city. This garden style cemetery was the opposite of the cramped churchyard: orderly, clean, peaceful, and landscaped. This was a cemetery meant to be visited as much as any park. In Genova, Italy, Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno is an example of the garden cemetery, acting as an outdoor art museum with beautiful sculptures demonstrating the realist movement.

Rural CemeteryGreen-Wood Cemetery :: Brooklyn, New York In the United States in the mid-1800s, Romanticism and an interest in nature inspired the rural style of cemetery. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn incorporated the rolling hills, oak groves, and glacial ponds of the countryside into its landscape of ornate monuments and winding roads. At its peak, Green-Wood was second only to Niagra Falls in American tourism and served as inspiration for Central Park in Manhattan.

Memorial ParkSummit View Cemetery :: Guthrie, Oklahoma From the mid-1800s to mid-1900s. the memorial park cemeteries took over in popularity. Expansive lawns cut into orderly grids held flat, plaque gravemarkers that concealed the cemetery’s identity. Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, has many of these hidden tombstones, although there are also upright graves, like that of the unfortunate bank robber turned sideshow mummy Elmer McCurdy.

MilitaryMadingley American Cemetery :: Cambridge, United KingdomSimilar to the memorial park cemeteries are military cemeteries, which became more prevalent with the massive casualties of the American Civil War. The military cemetery with its flat, manicured grass field and thousands of identical headstones was carried into the wars of the 20th century, including the Madingley American Cemetery for servicemen lost in World War II.

New IdeasNeptune Memorial Reef :: Miami, FloridaSpace is yet again running out, and many of the cemeteries established on the outskirts of town have been overtaken by urban expansion. There is now a “green” or natural burial movement to reduce the use of hazardous embalming fluids and rethink how loved ones can be honored in death. One example is the Neptune Memorial Reef opened in 2007 off of Florida, where cremated remains are mixed with concrete and cast into sculptures placed underwater as a habitat for fish and coral.

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